The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

lives. Folk culture's roots in agrarian perceptions of time and natural cycle ensures that images of death and rebirth abound at carnival, and its preoccupation with reproductive and scatological aspects of bodily experience provides a rich source of humorous imagery. Folk culture's focus on the lower strata of human bodily imagery furthers the carnival spirit of ideological destruction and rebirth, as these images serve as reminders that ideological principles and social constructs are neither fixed nor complete, but instead subject to ridicule and decay, revision, and regeneration. Abstract notions of authority break down, for instance, in grotesque carnival parodies of authority figures engaged in the bodily functions of sex or excretion. Bakhtin's carnivalesque grotesque is thus characterized by popular ridicule of official values (and officials themselves) and challenges to hierarchal structures. It destabilizes the official social order: “Carnival, for Bakhtin, is both a populist utopian vision of the world seen from below and a festive critique, through the inversion of hierarchy, of the ‘high’ culture” (Stallybrass and White 7).

Bakhtin's attention to the inter-subjective, dialogic nature of communication deflates some of the theoretical importance of hegemony, as ideology is never fixed and ideological debate is imbedded in our use of language. In his study of Bakhtin, Michael Bernard-Donals argues that this change breaks with Althusser's understanding of the relationship between subject and dominant ideology. He suggests that a primary difference between Althusser and Bakhtin is that “Althusser believes that subjects do not determine themselves (but believe because of ideological relations that they do), but rather they are determined by material forces; while Bakhtin believes that subjects both determine and are determined by their relation to language” (111). Bakhtin imagines a more fluid, less restrictive relationship between ideology and the subject than that of Althusser and many Marxist materialists; rather than focusing on the creation of an obedient subject through ideological apparatuses structured to secure the power of the state, he locates the creation of ideology in language and thus in the pens and mouths of language users. This conception attributes more agency to the subject than does Foucault's network of social power, but otherwise shares